The extent to which psychology students read textbooks: a multiple class analysis of reading across the psychology curriculum.

Knowing that the study strategies of students using college textbooks can be a powerful predictor of performance in the classroom, we examined the extent to which students in different psychology courses reported reading their textbooks. In psychology courses overall, students read on average 27.46% of the assigned readings before class and 69.98% before an exam, which corresponds to previous research. We furthermore found that these percentages were highly influenced by the course in which the students responded. In fact the percentages ranged from 21.21% to only 42.96% before class and from 60.83% to 91.20% before an exam, with significant differences existing between courses. Given that the majority of college students spend less than 3 hours reading textbook material and that they feel the instructor is responsible for reviewing material during class time, as well as, telling them what is important in the reading, instructors must find ways to encourage more reading by students, even if this involves giving quizzes over reading material.

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Reading educators, when focusing on a student's skills and difficulties in learning from textbooks, have found that college freshmen lack mature and efficient strategies necessary for learning on their own (Simpson, 1984 as cited in Wandersee, 1988). Throughout the study, Simpson found that college freshmen had minimal strategies for studying, did not know why they chose a particular strategy, and were uncertain in how to determine if they were prepared for an exam. Friedman and Wilson (1975) indicated that considerable efforts have been made to improve how students learn, but little attention has been paid to the core element of that process, which is how students read their textbooks. As evidence of this Friedman and Wilson found when students were presented unknowingly with textbooks containing glue seals throughout the textbook chapters, the students spent more time reading chapter summaries rather than the chapters themselves when preparing for an examination. Thus, students cannot be involved in the type of meaningful learning that Wandersee described, in which a student must find the meaning the author presents, decide its significance, learn the meaning, relate the concept to past experiences in order to clarify it, and continue to practice and review what was learned from the textbook material. This level of learning cannot take place by merely reading the chapters summaries in a textbook. Smith (1982) found the learning strategies of mature learners involve not only reading their textbooks, but they also find alternatives texts to aid them in their knowledge acquisition, which is in stark contrast to those only reading chapter summaries.

Wandersee (1988) stated that reading leads to better grades, which would lead one to assume that students would read their textbooks in order to prepare for examinations. However, Burchfield and Sappington (2000) found an overall decline in reading compliance over a 16 year span. Furthermore, Sikorski et al. (2002) found that most students reported reading their textbooks less than 3 hours per week, which is significantly less than university recommendations for study regimens, which commonly advise at least 2 hours of study time for every class credit (The Center for Advancement of Learning, 1998). For example, if a class meets for 3 hours a week, students should plan to spend at least 6 hours studying that subject each week. If a student has 15 class hours every week, he/she should spend at least 30 hours studying per week. The idea is that students need to treat college like a full-time job, meaning class preparation should take approximately 40 hours a week, but only 12 percent of college freshmen spend 26 hours or more a week studying, and most spend less than 15 hours a week studying (Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning, 2002). In addition George Kuh (in Young, 2002) stated that "students are studying about one-third as much as faculty say they ought to, to do well" (p. A.35). Not surprisingly then students are unable to develop the skills to be a mature learner, such as looking deeper into the materials (Wandersee, 1988) because they do not spend the recommended amount of time studying. As a result of this, many students focus on grades rather than learning, and so they cram in their studying rather than spending the expected 2 hours per credit hour studying every week (Young, 2002).

A possible result of not studying for the recommended amount of time is that students begin to not value the utility of the textbook as a primary source of information, instead they consider it second-rate to a teacher's lecture (Murden & Gillespie, 1997). This becomes even more evident when one examines Murden and Gillespie's results, in which they found that middle school students felt only 60 percent of the exam material represented concepts from the textbook material, whereas the teacher stated that 90 percent of the material on the exam was taken from the textbook. Apparently, Murden and Gillespie found that this was endemic to more than just middle school because high school students also underestimated the amount of exam material taken from the textbook chapters.

Given the fact that students do not give a high level of importance to their textbooks for studying and Burchfield and Sappington's (2000) finding of an overall decrease in reading compliance, we wondered to what extent students read in different psychology courses. Consequently, we used a modified version of the Textbook Reading in This Course survey (The Teaching Professor, 2001) to assess the extent to which students use textbooks in different courses, and we used it as a means to provide instructors with accurate information about how students handle course-related material. The amount students use their textbooks before class lectures, after lectures, and when preparing for exams can affect their performance on examinations, and so it is important to accurately gauge these factors in different psychology courses.

Method

Participants

Four hundred twenty-three undergraduate students at a northwestern university participated in this study. Of those participating, 267 were General Psychology students, 29 were Statistical Methods students, 27 were Advanced Statistical Methods students, 33 were Learning students, 24 were Cognitive Psychology students, 25 were Perception students, and 18 were Physiological Psychology students. Participation in this study was completely voluntary, with students in the General Psychology courses receiving partial course credit, and those in the other courses responding to the survey as one method of obtaining extra credit. Participants ranged in age from 18-years-old to 48-years-old (M = 22.43, SD = 5.47), with 64.6% female and 35.2% male (.2% did not report gender). Modal year in school was freshman (40.1%), followed by seniors (23.9%), sophomore (19.0%), junior (13.1%), and those not indicating (3.8%).

Materials

The 8 questions from the Textbook Reading in this Course (TRTC; The Teaching Professor, 2001), which we altered by including a "I do not read the assigned material" option for the first 6 questions, were combined with 4 questions from Solomon's (1979) study, which had students estimate the percentage of readings they do before class and before an exam both for psychology courses and the other courses in which they are enrolled. The first portion of the survey, which included the 8 questions from the TRTC, had students respond to the following questions: "When do you typically do the assigned reading for this class?", "How much time do you spend on one of the reading assignments?", "What do you do when you read the material?", "What do you see as the relationship between material presented in class and material covered in the book?", "How do you review text material before the exam?", "what can the teacher do to support your effort to learn text material?", "Offer some evaluative commentary on the course text. Is it easy to understand? Is it well organized? How does it hold you attention? Would you recommend its continued use in the course?", and "Overall, how would you rate your text reading skills: exceptional, above average, average, below average, or poor. On what is your assessment based? Do you believe your text reading skills are improving? In what ways?" (The Teaching Professor, 2001, p. 8).

Additionally, the participants reported the following percentages, which were taken from Solomon's (1979) study: "What percentage of the readings do you do before you come to class?", "what percentage of the readings do you do before the material is included on an exam?", "In other classes that you take, what percentage of the readings do you do before the material is covered in class?", and "In other classes that you take, what percentage of the readings do you do before the material is included on an exam?" (p. 79).

Procedure

Students responded to the questions in large groups after a description of the study, assurance of anonymity, and answering of all questions. Most students completed the questions within 15 minutes.

Results

In Psychology courses overall, students read 27.46% of the assigned readings before coming to class and 69.98% before that material was included on a test. Although, overall no significant differences existed, F (7,414) = 1.18, n.s., between the classes with regard to reading before the class for which it is assigned (see Table 1 for mean percentages and standard deviations), the students in the Advanced Statistics course read the text before class significantly more than students in the Statistical Methods course, t (48.12) = 2.29, p < .05.

Significant differences existed between the classes, F (7,414) = 4.65,p < .001, with regard to reading the text before the material was included on a test, and these differences were investigated with a priori t-tests (see Table 2 for mean percentages and standard deviations). Students in the General Psychology course during the Spring 2002 semester read the text before a test significantly less than students in the General Psychology course during the Fail 2002 semester, t (75.79) = -2.64, p < .01, Advanced Statistics course, t (42.44) = -3.83,p < .001, Perception course, t (76.67) = -7.56, p < .001, Physiological Psychology course, t (155) = 2.06, p < .05, and Cognitive Psychology course, t (32.60) = -2.84, p < .01. Furthermore, students in the Perception course read the text before the test significantly more than students in the General Psychology course during the Fall 2002 semester, t (75.79) = 4.97, p < .001, Statistical Methods course, t (37.44) = 3.29, p < .01, and Learning course, t (46.12) = 3.56, p < .01.

Discussion

We found that students on average only read 27.46% of the assigned readings before the class in which it was covered. This finding was not tempered by higher levels of reading in courses above the introductory-level (an average of only 28.08%), which is discordant with what Burchfield and Sappington (2000) found. Although students read very little initially before class, they seem to read a large portion of the assigned reading before the test as evidenced by the increase to an average overall of nearly 70%, and a maximum of 92.10% for one class.

With such low levels of readings before class, it is not surprising that many students are not involved in class. Karp and Yoels (1976) noted that many students felt that having read was one of the most important factors in their decision to participate in class, and consequently, those students who are not prepared usually remain silent and uninvolved. Many researchers (Burchfield & Sappington, 2000; Connor-Greene, 2000; Marchant, 2002; Ruscio, 2001; Sappington, Kinsey, & Munsayac, 2002; Steuer, 1996) have found, or have suggested, faculty should quiz students because this increases their reading of textual material. When students are quizzed over their textual material, the amount of reading increases to levels similar to what we found for reading before a test. In fact, Marchant (2002) found that students read an article more thoroughly when they expected a quiz over material compared to when they did not expect a quiz. The interesting aspect of Marchant's finding is that the materials the students were given were specifically classified as important professionally. Consequently, even providing students with material to read which is very applicable to their lives may not entice them to read. It appears though that when students feel they will definitely be responsible for displaying their understanding of the text, either through a quiz or on a test, the amount of textual material read increases, but it never reaches 100%, and the reason for this fact warrants further investigation.

One possible limitation associated with this study is the fact that we only collected data at one large western institution, and consequently, our results may not be generalizable to other, smaller institutions. However, for two different sized universities Sikorski et al. (2002) found similar levels of students who reported at most very little reading for at least one introductory college course. Future research should investigate the extent to which other institutions of varying sizes have similar levels of reading in their classes, but we expect based on Sikorski et al.'s results that these findings will correspond to ours.

One wonders what to do in response to our low findings and Burchfield and Sappington's (2000) findings of a consistent decrease of reading compliance over a 16 year period. One suggestion might to be to provide extra credit to students for completing their assigned readings as Carkenord (1994) did. Carkenord found a high level of reading following the inclusion of extra credit for reading, summarizing, and critiquing the assigned articles, but not every student took advantage of this opportunity, and only 35% appeared to read each time. Thus, this technique is obviously effective in increasing reading, but it is not the "cure-all" for the epidemic. Another possibility would be to include students in the development of textbook material. If students are allowed to influence the process, they may suggest alterations to textbooks that match with what is likely to engage them and their interests. However, it may never be possible to obtain full compliance with reading assignments because we found that the majority of students (61.6%) felt that the instructor should tell them exactly what was important in the reading. In addition, Sikorski et al. (2002) found that only a very small portion (an average of 5% between the two universities) felt that reading only was "the most important factor influencing their final grades" (p. 313). Furthermore, Murden and Gillespie (1997) found that students tend to minimize the textbook's role as the primary source of information, and many consider it a second-rate approach to studying, especially compared to their teacher's lecture. Hence, some students may just choose to attend class and not read the required assignments, but it is still important to determine the possible reasons for this behavior. More specifically, future research may want to examine learning styles, personality, focus-of-control, or entitlement as possible contributing factors to why some students chose not to read the assigned textual material, because in the end, the more we know about when and why students do and do not use their textbook, the more efficient instruction becomes.

Table 1

Mean Percentages and Standard Deviations for the Different Classes with
Respect to Reading before a Psychology Coarse

Course                           N      M%       SD

General Psychology Spring 02    139    26.42    30.37
General Psychology Fall 02      127    27.76    31.73
Statistical Methods              29    21.21    30.08
Cognitive Psychology             24    27.50    31.55
Learning                         33    25.03    30.77
Perception                       25    28.08    32.17
Physiological Psychology         18    23.72    29.40
Advanced Statistics              27    42.46    40.01
Total                           422    27.46    31.66

Table 2

Mean Percentages and Standard Deviations for the Different Classes
with Respect to Reading before a Test in a Psychology Course

Course                           N      M%       SD

General Psychology Spring 02    139    60.83    32.71
General Psychology Fall 02      128    71.22    31.38
Statistical Methods              29    66.55    37.16
Cognitive Psychology             24    80.33    30.84
Learning                         33    68.09    33.43
Perception                       25    91.20    14.53
Physiological Psychology         18    77.56    29.96
Advanced Statistics              27    83.33    26.89
Total                           423    69.98    32.30

References

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Smith, S. L. (1982). Learning strategies of mature college learners. Journal of Reading, 26, 5-12.

Solomon, P. R. (1979). The two-point system: A method for encouraging students to read assigned material before class. Teaching of Psychology, 6, 77-79.

Steuer, E B. (1996). Reading in the undergraduate psychology curriculum. Teaching of Psychology, 23, 226-230.

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Young, J. R. (2002). Homework? What homework? Students seem to be spending less time studying than they used to. Web site: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/il5/15a03501. htm, 1-10.

Michael A. Clump, Ph.D., Assistant Professor/Chair, Undergraduate Psychology Program, Departmnet of Education and Human Services, Marymount University. Heather Bauer and Catherine Bradley, Undergraduate Students, Psychology Department, Boise State University.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Michael A. C lump ,Assistant Professor/Chair, Undergraduate Psychology Program, Departmnet of Education and Human Services, Marymount University, 2807 North Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22207-4277; Email: michael.clump @marymount.edu.